Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 15
July 30, 2007
Going…and staying
Earlier this year, “New Order voice” columnist Will Braun issued a challenge to Mennonite Church Canada and other organizations to consider ways they could reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, especially in the area of air travel.
But, as general secretary Robert J. Suderman reminded delegates at Abbotsford 2007, MC Canada is much bigger than the office at 600 Shaftesbury Boulevard, Winnipeg; it also includes 33,000 individual church members. While this reminder doesn’t deflect Braun’s eco-challenge from the organization to people in the pews, such a comparison is still warranted.
Since the church is to be about God’s mission in the world, which part—the organization or its members—is doing the best job globally in terms of missional effectiveness and environmental friendliness?
On the one hand, Witness workers train for their mission assignments, often spending years at Bible college or seminary, and then make a commitment to serve for a number of years—sometimes a lifetime. After flying overseas, it may be years before they return home again. Two days of being part of the airborne environmental problem versus hundreds of days being part of Christ’s spiritual solution on the ground.
Compare this to the 1.6 million North Americans, including Mennonites, who took part in foreign mission trips of two-weeks’ duration or less last year (according to a Princeton University survey). It’s not hard to see a stark contrast between the relative environmental friendliness of these trips with those who have made missions a long-term commitment.
But mission trips don’t tell the whole story. Over the last couple of generations—with increasing levels of prosperity and the relatively low cost of air travel—Mennonites of all ages have taken to the skies.
Are half of our young people—who will inherit the Earth—willing to take Braun’s challenge and curtail their globe-trotting rites-of-passage? Instead of opting for a service assignment in Bangkok or working on a farm in Europe, how about Mennonite voluntary service in their own city or province?
The same could be asked of the older generation. When Mennonites first began migrating from one country or continent to another, it was almost always a one-way trip. Later, couples might have saved for a once-in-a-lifetime trip back to the “old country.” Now, however, such trips have been transformed into annual tours and excursions of Europe or the Holy Land—or even the “sunny south.”
University of British Columbia prof William Rees asked the following question of the recent Live Earth concerts, that involved pop stars flying around the world, some on private jets, to do their shows in far-off places: “[Will] the concerts change people’s lives enough to compensate for the additional consumption stimulated by the events?”
The same question needs to be asked by Mennonites of their short-term mission trips and their excursions to experience the world. And if the answer is yes, then we have to ask how we can reconcile our desire to embrace Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” with Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth” of global warming.
There is a solution, though. More missionary “lifers” like Dutch Mennonite Pieter Jansz—who served in Indonesia for 53 years without a visit home—need to say, “Yes, I will go, and yes, I will stay”—for the sake of the gospel (Jansz’s legacy of faithfulness is the sixth largest Mennonite Church body in the world) and for the sake of God’s creation.